If Oracle and Sun merge, customer negotiations could get tricky
If customers can't lock in good deals now, they should wait until the merger is settled to negotiate
Oracle's acquisition of Sun has hit some European roadblocks, but if it goes through customers will have to prepare to negotiate with a new IT behemoth. With Sun on board, Oracle will have the software and hardware it needs to compete against more well-rounded companies such as IBM, and could vault up to the top of the open source industry, according to Gartner.
"Believe it or not, Oracle would become the most powerful open source vendor in the market today, bar none," analyst George Weiss told audience members at this week's Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas.
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The European Commission has objected to Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun, saying the combination of Oracle's database products with Sun's open source MySQL violates European competition laws. But a compromise could still be worked out allowing the completion of the acquisition.
The combination of Oracle, a software vendor with a proprietary history, with Sun, a hardware vendor with open source inclinations, raises many questions. These questions, Weiss says, including the following:
- Will Oracle support IBM applications, such as WebSphere, on Sun's Sparc servers?
- Will Oracle put most of its efforts into Linux or Solaris?
- Will Oracle continue Sun's partnership with Fujitsu to design Sparc processors?
- Will Oracle attempt to move existing database customers from IBM and HP servers to Sun's Sparc machines?
- How much sales energy will Oracle focus on combating IBM, HP and Dell in the x86 market?
In an electronic poll of the Gartner audience, a plurality of 46 percent took a positive view, saying they expect Oracle to bolster and develop broad new capabilities for Sun's hardware. The rest believe Oracle's approach to Sun hardware will be either to sell it off to another vendor, reduce and minimize to bare bones capabilities, or barely pay attention to the hardware product lines.
Weiss offered several pieces of advice to customers as they wait to see what happens with the pending Oracle/Sun acquisition. That advice includes:
